Roger Nash Baldwin and the American Civil Liberties Union

Abstract

“Contradictions abounded in this epochal figure in the pantheon of American liberalism, reform, and radicalism,” writes Robert C. Cottrell of Roger Nash Baldwin, a founding father and longtime leader of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Baldwin had been born into affluence yet spent most of his life allied with radicals. He created the ACLU to check governmental encroachments on personal freedom, yet he delighted in associating with powerful public officials, among them that nemeses of civil liberties, J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation). Democratic in his politics, Baldwin was an authoritarian at home and in the ACLU office. He combined puritanical moralism with perpetual philandering and unconventional marriages. Although personally frugal and a pinchpenny administrator, Baldwin seized upon the opportunity that his second wife's wealth afforded him to divide his time between a New York town house, a New Jersey estate, and a retreat on Martha's Vineyard. Finally, “While beginning his career as a progressive reformer, he headed leftward, becoming one of America's leading Popular Fronters, before ending up in the liberal anticommunist camp.”